Today, media playback devices, such as media players or music players, have storage capacity to store large collections of media, such as music. With such large media collections, in order for a user to select a particular song to be played by the media player, the user typically navigates through a long list of songs. As an example, the user could interact with the media player to display a list of artists that have songs that are stored within the media collection on the media player. The user then scrolls through the list and selects an appropriate song to be played. Unfortunately, however, as the storage capacity of media players increases, the number of songs stored in a media collection on a media player increases. Consequently, the list through which users must navigate in order to select a song can be extensive. One conventional approach to assisting users in traversing large collections of music is to provide acceleration with respect to the user input. For example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2003/0076301 A1 describes one approach in which a user is able to scroll through lists of songs in an accelerated manner. The degree of acceleration can be based on the speed of a rotational user input. While acceleration is very helpful, in some cases, users can have difficulty or frustration locating the specific song of interest even when acceleration has been applied. Recently, media players have become capable of storing and playing back various different types of media items. The storage of various different types of media items makes locating of a specific media item even more complicated.
Besides navigating and traversing lists to locate media items of interest, another way to locate media items of interest is to search for media items that have a particular character string (e.g., word). For example, an online media store or a desktop media management application can enable a user to search available media content. Unfortunately, however, portable media playback devices have conventionally relied on navigation and traversal of lists and thus have not provided search capabilities.
Thus, there remains a need for further approaches to assist a user in locating media items of interest.